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Saturday, April 23, 2011

A story that combines UFO cover-ups with the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a gold mine for conspiracy theorists. And that's just what author William Lester says he uncovered while conducting research for a new book on Kennedy: a memo written by JFK and addressed to the CIA in which the president requests confidential information about UFOs.

In the never-before-seen, top secret memo supposedly written on Nov. 12, 1963, the president ordered the CIA director to organize the agency's intelligence files relating to UFOs, and to debrief him on all "unknowns" by the following February.

Ten days later, Kennedy was assassinated. The newly surfaced document is bound to add fuel to the undying fire surrounding the president's death. But first things first: Is the document authentic?read more here

So the notion that someone is "left-brained" or "right-brained" is absolute nonsense.

All complex behaviors and cognitive functions require the integrated actions of multiple brain regions in both hemispheres of the brain.

All types of information are probably processed in both the left and right hemispheres (perhaps in different ways, so that the processing carried out on one side of the brain complements, rather than substitutes, that being carried out on the other).

Friday, April 15, 2011

In the early 1800s, John Bell moved his family from North Carolina to the Red River bottomland in Robertson County, Tennessee, settling in a community, Red River, which became Adams, Tennessee many years later. Bell purchased some land and a large house for his family.

Over the next several years, he acquired more land, increasing his holdings to 328 acres, and cleared a number of fields for planting. He was also made an Elder of Red River Baptist Church. The Bells also had three more children after moving to Tennessee. Elizabeth (Betsy) was born in 1806; Richard was born in 1811; Joel was born in 1813. John Bell house, home of the Bell Witch of Tennessee The Bell homestead. From Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, M.V. Ingram, 1894.

One day in 1817, John Bell was inspecting his corn field when he encountered a strange-looking animal sitting in the middle of a corn row. Shocked by the appearance of this animal, which had the body of a dog and the head of a rabbit, Bell shot several times. The animal vanished. Bell thought nothing more about the incident, at least not until after dinner. That evening, the Bells began hearing "beating" sounds on the outside walls of their log house.

The mysterious sounds continued with increased frequency and force each night.

Bell and his sons often hurried outside to catch the culprit but always returned empty-handed. In the weeks that followed, the Bell children began waking up frightened, complaining that rats were gnawing at their bedposts. Not long after that, the children began complaining of having having their bed covers pulled from them and their pillows tossed onto the floor by a seemingly invisible entity.

It took eight years and nine experiments with more than 1,000 participants, but the results offer evidence that humans have some ability to anticipate the future."Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it's the most magical," said Daryl Bem, professor of psychology emeritus, whose study will be published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sometime next year.

"It most violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don't know about them," said Bem, who studied physics before becoming a psychologist.

Publishing on this topic has gladdened the hearts of psi researchers but stumped doubting social psychologists, who cannot fault Bem's mainstream and widely accepted methodology. Bem became interested in the scientific study of psi (unexplained processes of information or energy transfer) when he was asked to find methodological flaws in one psi researcher's successful extrasensory perception studies -- and couldn't.

"The research and this article are specifically targeted to my fellow social psychologists," Bem said. "I designed the experiments to be persuasive, simple and transparent enough to encourage them to try replicating these experiments for themselves." Bem's innovation in the experiments reported in the article was to "take well-known phenomena in psychology and reverse their time course."

Rather than present a stimulus and measure a subject's response, Bem measured the subject's response before the stimulus was presented. In some earlier experiments by other psi researchers, participants were hooked up to physiological measuring equipment similar to a lie detector that measured emotional arousal. They sat before a computer and watched randomly selected images; some were erotic or very negative ("like the bloody photos you see on CSI") images.

"Your physiology jumps when you see one of those pictures after watching a series of landscapes or neutral pictures," Bem said. "But the remarkable finding is that your physiology jumps before the provocative picture actually appears on the screen -- even before the computer decides which picture to show you. What it shows is that your physiology can anticipate an upcoming event even though your conscious self might not."

Bem's nine experiments demonstrated similar unconscious influences from future events. For example, in one experiment, participants saw a list of words and were then given a test in which they tried to retype as many of the words as they could remember. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words from the list and gave the participants practice exercises on them. When their earlier memory test results were checked, it was found that they had remembered more of the words they were to practice later than words they were not going to practice. In other words, the practice exercises had reached back in time to help them on the earlier test.

All but one of the nine experiments confirmed the hypothesis that psi exists. The odds against the combined results being due to chance or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1, according to Bem.

Throughout his career Bem has taken paths less traveled. In 1994 he co-authored a series of experiments on telepathy published in another APA journal, the Psychological Bulletin. "In my work, I have always pursued problems or puzzles that strike me as interesting and have not worried about how it might affect my career. I have a maverick approach to many psychological topics, and I consider myself fortunate that Cornell has always given me the freedom to do that."

Bem, who came to Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007, said it is unusual for him to work on one topic for eight years, "but this one was a biggie and seemed like an appropriate thing to end my career with. The journal in which it will appear is the same journal that published my very first article 50 years ago."

Bem said he conducted the experiments because he believed that existing research strongly implied that precognition is real. "I went in optimistic that I would be able to find it with these experiments," he said. "After I started getting positive results, my undergraduate research team seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm and said, 'But didn't you tell us you thought these would work?'

"I said yes, but when I actually see them work, that's very different."

Friday, April 1, 2011

Amos and I have decided that it's OK to have a little paranoia now that we're working the Mysteries Report. Of course it's easy to get yourself worked up over nothing. But, just now, while updating some features on the website, we heard a noise that made us stand up and start looking around for the source. We assumed it was the space heater fan going bad. So we kicked it around a little...no change. We followed the noise into the kitchen...maybe the fridge was going haywire...nope.

We opened the back door and there, about 100 feet above us is a helicopter, hovering. We smiled and stared at it for a minute. Probably not the best move if it was something to be concerned about. But it was so close...and positioned in such a way that we could see the pilot. and it was...just hovering. Well, just hovering doesn't capture the moment, when you consider how much noise and wind a helicopter makes. We both laughed and stared at it...each of us suggesting different scenarios as to why it was right there, both joking that it was watching us because we publish a paper.

I laughed and said I should at least get a video. Pull out my phone...point...error message! Won't take a video. Not that there was anything special about the helicopter. Other than that it was there...right above us, just watching.

This just now happened. We came inside and I wrote this. We aren't too freaked out. It was broad daylight. He was, after all, just looking at us. What's the harm in that. And the helicopter wasn't even black.